Abstract
We investigated hiragana word attributes such as “congruency”, familiarity, imageability, lexicality,word length on oral reading performance of 21 Japanese-speaking patients with aphasia. Hiragana character corresponds to one syllable with few exceptions. We have experienced aphasic patients have difficulty with reading aloud these exceptional representations. We operationally defined this correspondence relationship as “congruency”. All 21 Japanese-speaking patients were in the chronic stage of their illness and their severities of aphasia were moderate to mild. We evaluated their oral reading performance of 100 hiragana words and 50 non-words, and cognitive-neuropsychological tests which seemed to be related to oral reading. The experimental stimuli of the words and non-words were controlled attributes. As a result,we found all effects of congruency, familiarity, imageability, lexicality and word length. And we also found that auditory synonym judgment and extraction of mora were important abilities for hiragana words and non-words oral reading based on the result of the categorical regression analysis. As with the processing of kanji, which has already been reported previously, our results first suggested that the lexical route was involved in the processing of hiragana words oral reading on aphasic patients.
